The Bookseller of Kabul -- A Complex Portrait of Afghan Life by War Correspondent

Author Asne Seierstad

Asne Seierstad, a 33-year-old Norwegian journalist, has caused a sensation with her new book, The Bookseller of Kabul (Little, Brown). Published in Norway by J.W. Cappelens Forlag in 2002 and released in Denmark, Sweden, and Italy, it was first published in English in the U.K. by Little, Brown, in August. It will debut in Greece, Spain, Finland, and Iceland later this year. The U.S. edition (translated by Ingrid Christophersen), originally slated for a spring 2004 release, will be published on October 29.

Events are moving quickly even for the peripatetic Seierstad. On the same day she spoke to BTW from her home in Oslo, the author received news that with sales of 200,000 copies, her book had become the top-selling nonfiction title in the country's history and that the main subject of the book, Shah Mohammad Rais, had arrived in Olso to have his "honor restored" by denouncing The Bookseller of Kabul and by seeking legal redress and compensation, according to a story on the front page of Oslo's Aftenposten newspaper. Seierstad is completing a second book, to be released this year, based on her experiences in Baghdad reporting on the war from January through April 2003.

Shah Mohammad Rais, called Sultan Khan in The Bookseller of Kabul, became the focus of Seierstad's inquiry when, in November 2001, she happened to visit his besieged shop. Like the rest of Kabul, during the overthrow of the Taliban, the store had no electricity. Having spent the past three months with soldiers in the field, sleeping in mud huts, and traveling by horse and by foot, the war correspondent was delighted to find this educated, English-speaking, courtly engineer who had plied his trade through the regimes of the Afghan kings of the 1970s, the Soviet invasion and the subsequent guerilla war, the Mujahadeen coup, and its overthrow by the Taliban. Khan and his business were assaulted by all of those in power due, in part, to his insistence on buying a few copies of every title he found and on carrying materials published by fundamentalists, communists, Afghan poets, and historians alike.

Many times he was arrested, sent to jail, and his shop was destroyed. He used the time in prison to immerse himself in the culture and history of his country by reading books smuggled in by his family. During the 1992 attacks on Kabul by the Mujahadeen, Khan took his family to Pakistan. He returned to Kabul to find his shop decimated, as was the national library, a repository of treasured manuscripts. For a few dollars, Khan purchased works many centuries old, including a 500-year-old manuscript for which the Uzbek government eventually offered him $25,000. He continued to carry a wide range of inventory, about 10,000 volumes, hidden away, but the Taliban regime posed new concerns for all those who dealt in Afghan art or culture. Again incarcerated, Khan's shop was destroyed, as were all the priceless contents of the Kabul Museum. Khan bribed his way out of prison, returned to the remains of his shop, and attempted to save some books from destruction by covering up all the pictures -- depictions of life being anathema to the Taliban -- with paper and tape or scribbles.

With the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Khan left his precious book collection and three bookshops in the hands of one of his younger brothers, and, again, took his family to Pakistan. He returned two months later, able to uncover the pictures and place his books back on the shelves. He developed several lucrative projects, selling cheaply reprinted books in English and souvenir postcards to soldiers, peacekeeping and rescue forces, and other foreigners. It was then that Seierstad became acquainted with him and proposed that she learn about the real Afghan people by living with his extended family in Kabul. She spent five months in his home.

BTW asked Seierstad if Khan should be considered an enlightened intellectual and a hero for all he's endured to preserve Afghan culture. She responded that she knew that he was expecting to be characterized that way in her book, but he was bitterly disappointed, "He was very democratic in inviting me into his home, very generous and helpful. He said that I was welcome to move in and to write whatever I wanted. He's very concerned about Afghanistan being known in the world. He's got great respect for journalists, those who come and write about his country. But he is a man with many sides. He is educated, trained as an engineer, and he has read all the history of the region and all the poetry. He has not read the modern books or foreign books and doesn't have the broad kind of knowledge that an intellectual would. He's really a village boy -- both his parents were illiterate. When it comes to running his family, he has only one model and that's his father.

"He is not of the Taliban or a fundamentalist, but the family structure is so hierarchical, and he rules like an autocrat. He discarded his loyal wife of many years and got a second wife. She was 16 years old, and he bought her from her parents. Only a rich man can afford more than one wife because the women can't work, so he has to support the wives and all the children. He is a clever man and prosperous. He's so proud of his young wife. He wants the best of two worlds -- he [in his mid-50s] throws away his first wife and buys a young girl, yet he's educated, liberal, and performing a very important job in Afghanistan by reprinting and selling books."

Seierstad was able to speak English with Khan; his eldest son, Mansur; and his 19-year-old sister, Leila, who have been educated in Pakistan. They provided the filters through which she learned about the family.

She first roomed with Leila, an intelligent, competent young woman who suffered terribly under the constraints of her family, toiling at housework while Khan's ornamental teenage bride sat by idly and was waited on. Seierstad described to BTW the realities of living in an Afghan home.

"It was a very crowded household. First, I shared a room with Leila, then I had my own little room -- not really a room -- it didn't have even my own door to lock, it was some carpets hanging. Anyone could just come in look in at any moment, but these are things you just get used to because you have to. My aim was really to find out about the life there. I realized that you just have to forget about the Western lifestyle -- the showers in the morning or your bicycle and all the small things that make you feel that you're having a good life. And, of course, wine or food. All these things -- the practical things I could cope with -- the fact that it was cold, that we had no running water, no electricity at times. You get used to that. I could never get used to the total system of humiliation of women -- their subjugation -- denying them real simple human rights, the right to decide things for yourself, the right even to leave your house when you want.
"In the Western society, especially the Americans, the individual has value in itself…. Nobody can say that some people are worth more than others. But in this society that was so hierarchical and with such a double standard -- it made me very angry. It was something I could never get used to, but I had to. I didn't want to get into quarrels with people. I wasn't there to change people. I wanted to report exactly how it was…. I'm probably more compassionate when talking about the women. It was so tiring to be there -- so emotional."

Seierstad considered the response of Shah Mohammad Rais (Khan) a bit more explosive than she had expected. She met with him at his hotel the evening that the story appeared. "To have someone with me who was older than he is," Seierstad said she brought along her father. "[Khan] told me that everything in the book was true, but that it was too honest," Seierstad said. "He felt parts were disrespectful and shouldn't be said. I worked very carefully to leave things out that I thought would be disrespectful. He needs to do this, to say how bad it is, but I don't think he can win in any court."

Seierstad told BTW, "He has many good sides. He's quite prosperous and Afghanistan needs people like him -- people who can run their own businesses. Very few people can. This is such a poor and backward country and has been through such hardship -- how do we ever expect things to change? Change will come over generations. You ask what people there thought about the 9/11 attacks -- most people there didn't know about it. They can't read a newspaper, if there was one. I hardly saw a newspaper in Kabul. Most people have no radio. Most people don't have a chair, they don't have a table, they don't have a bed.

"It's a terrible situation on many fronts. Every fourth child dies before age five. I focus on the women in this book. I believe the only hope is through education. Years will go by, and girls and boys will go to college and rebuild the country. Sultan Khan is struggling today with what the whole Afghan society is struggling with -- the conflict between tradition and modern society." -- Nomi Schwartz